Before You Knew My Name, Jacqueline Bublitz [best book club books for discussion txt] 📗

him. It’s supposed to shake you out of that inertia you’re hiding behind. I want to take my index finger and run it from his ear, down his neck and onto his chest. There, I’d need both hands, I’d need all my fingers, spread like arteries, or an explosion. And every place I touched—here, here, here—I’d say: There she is. There is the way she leans forward when she’s listening to you, there is the constant glisten of her eyes when something moves her. There is the curve of flesh under her cotton shirt, and the way she self-consciously pulls at the fabric, unaware that she pulls you in, too.

If the living could see all that light, the city maps drawn under the skin, they’d be awestruck. Looking at Ruby and Josh right now, they’d see how nervousness and anticipation might seem the same on the surface, but they’re so very different at the source. Nervousness is rushing water, river mouths, but anticipation is something far more delicate, little bubbles that go pop, one bright burst after another, until the body is a glass of champagne, a million golden beads of air, rising.

It’s beautiful. To see how much joy the body can hold.

‘My friends back home would not understand me anymore,’ Ruby is saying now, those little beads forming. They are talking about Death Club specifically, and their mutual fascination with death and dying more generally.

‘I’m not even sure they’d like me these days. I might be too … problematic.’

‘I wasn’t the easiest guy to be around after the accident, either,’ Josh admits. ‘Not for anyone who knew me before.’

‘Your ex-wife you mean?’ Ruby asks, her eyebrows raised.

Across the table, Josh pulls a face.

‘Let’s just say she didn’t cope so well with the new me. Or I stopped dealing so well with the same old her. Either way, it got messy pretty quick.’

‘They say divorce is a kind of death,’ Ruby says tentatively, reaching out to touch Josh’s hand across the table. ‘That must have been tough, when your world was already upside down.’

Josh opens his mouth as if to say something, and then shakes his head.

‘Yeah,’ he finally responds. ‘It wasn’t great. But that’s all in the past. For both of us.’

There is nothing Ruby can add for now; she removes her hand and steers the conversation back to safer ground.

‘I still don’t understand how nobody missed Alice all this time. Why did it take so long for someone to notice she was missing?’ ‘My guess is that the people who knew her best had things to hide,’ Josh answers. ‘Most people do. Or maybe she just knew really shitty people.’

And just like that, they’re back to the game. Imagining my life. Playing with it. Only this time it makes me mad. Because once again, Josh has come so close to getting it right.

There are people who chose to push me away. To stop—or never even try—looking for me. Because they wanted to distance themselves from me. Even after it was clear something bad had happened.

But that’s going to be harder now, isn’t it. With my name on everyone’s lips.

The night is nearly over. It is the kind of date I should have liked to have had, one day. Manhattans and jazz, and all that electricity under the skin. I decide to play a little game of my own. On behalf of everything I’ve lost.

Knees, a nudge, more forceful this time. I take my anger at all the people who let me down and reshape it.

As Ruby runs her forefinger along the rim of her cocktail glass, pulls at her earlobe, Josh doesn’t move, can’t move his leg away from hers. Was that some kind of otherness he felt just now? A push from someone unseen?

(It makes sense that the guy who died and came back is the first to really feel it.)

I want to sit myself down in front of them. Show her the nerves that flicker wherever they touch. Shift her fingers from glass to his lips, say, Here, this place, is home, and I think if I whispered this to Josh just now, he might actually hear me. I try my hardest, but the words come out as a saxophone solo, filling the room.

This is your night. I say it louder this time, and the curtains rustle. Let go! I shout, and the candle between them flickers. My voice is music and flame and velvet, now that I know how to hear it. I am everything that touches lightly, everything that lingers. Less and less like limbs and hair and teeth and bone. More like air and sensation and the spark that shoots a river of blue all through a man’s body.

This new sensation feels like power. The ability to make the world move in my direction, after all. It is an extraordinary feeling. Formidable. After being tossed about for so long.

I know exactly where to take it.

The man who killed me sits at home, just a block or two from the river. Candles flickering, night air whistling. He takes a long drag of his cigarette, watches his breath turn into a spiral of smoke. He thinks of how powerful he was in that moment, down by the river, and his conceit causes me to create a crack in the sky, thunder that shakes him in his chair.

My sudden, glorious anger fills the room. This man should be the one thinking about limbs and teeth and hair and bone.

Because—the wind hisses, the candle flickers—all that I used to be, all that he took from a girl named Alice Lee, will soon come knocking at his door.

The next day. Ruby cannot stop thinking about Josh. The man who gave her the gift of a name for her dead girl. They’d talked well into the night and it was 2.30 a.m. when he hailed her a cab, a light rain falling. Saying goodbye, Josh leaned in and kissed Ruby’s damp cheek, and